I accidentally did a quick format on my HDD and have been trying various recovery software to retrieve the data. The software usually find files but the problem I'm having is when I recover the files they are usually corrupt/unreadable - PDF and RAR compressed files.

At least on a Windows system, significant amounts of data can get overwritten even on a completely idle NTFS re-formatted HDD. Space where former files used to be located being marked as free, system files can go wherever the system wants, most notably journaling files.

If you can recover files in raw modes, at least those files must be intact, their contents must be intact, but their records in the MFT may have been altered. When the MFT has been completely overwritten (unlikely here after a quick format, and the recovery softwares wouldn't be able to recognize any folder structure whatsoever), the metadata is lost, meaning that the names, timestamps and other properties can not be recovered, even if the contents of all files are still 100% valid, in which case only raw recovery is possible.R-Studio would be worth trying, it usually is very efficient at reconstructing a folder structure when the filesystem has been significantly altered (and can also do raw file recovery, targetting pretty much all common file formats).TestDisk may be able to recover the former partition in-place, although it's quite risky. It can extract a full image beforehand, but for a 4TB HDD it's quite a chore. Its companion program Photorec is designed for raw file carving, it's been recognized as one of the most efficient solutions available for that task, challenging very expensive professional forensics suites despite being free (it's not perfect though, I've noted some shortcomings in particular situations, and in case files are fragmented there's little chance that it's going to recover them completely). If you really can't recover the folder structure, it's certainly not ideal, but it's certainly better than nothing!

I accidentally did a quick format on my HDD and have been trying various recovery software to retrieve the data. The software usually find files but the problem I'm having is when I recover the files they are usually corrupt/unreadable - PDF and RAR compressed files.

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